Tag Archives: Memory

Stuart [Dybek] surprised me when he told us on the first day of class that writing was about memory—making memories matter in the present. Writing, description in particular, was a matter of translating personal obsessions into words. When you write you explore your own mind, a process that is largely intuitive and unconscious.

We think of writing as springing from memory, when in fact it may be that memory often springs from writing. The assumption that memory is waiting to spill its contents onto the page may be faulty. More likely, the writing, as guided by the music of the writer’s voice, is what leads us back through a labyrinth to a memory we once lost. The commitment to the writing, the attending to the presentness of the narrative, the act of imagining, the willingness to trust inspiration may be the surest route to the vividness of memory.

In The Comfort of Things, the anthropologist Daniel Miller refutes “the myth of materialism,” the assumption that “our relationships to things” thrive “at the expense of our relationships to people.” He argues, on the contrary, that our experiences with objects and people “are much more akin and entwined than is commonly accepted.” Based on the ethnographic study that he conducted in a South London neighborhood, the book shows that domestic objects not only represent their owners but also accrue meanings from the relationships that their possessors have with other people. Inevitably some of the objects in the households he visited had been intentional or unintentional legacies: They were left to their owners by family members or friends now dead, or, more simply, they were what was left of these loved ones. Photographs, clothes, jewelry, paintings, sports equipment, figurines, tools, and music CD’s are typical of the objects through which survivors remembered, indeed, continued to relate to, those who were gone, and most of the objects were on display in their homes.

My writing students have been bringing family images to my memoir class for 20 years. They are mainly women, painfully eager to know how to use writing to make sense of their life narrative–who they are, who they once were, what heritage they were born into–and they are immobilized by the size of the task. Where to start? Where to stop? What to put in? What to leave out? How to find the story’s proper shape and sequence? How to deal equitably with all that is still unreconciled…

I sympathize with their despair; there’s just much too much stuff in the cluttered attic of memory. I can only offer one word of salvation: Reduce! You must decide what is primary and what is secondary. You’re not required to tell everybody’s story; you only need to tell your story. If you give an honest accounting of the important people and events in your life, as you best remember them, you will also tell the story of everybody who needs to be along on the ride. Throw everything else away.

And something else I don’t like about e-book readers is that they re-paginate the book. For me, my books in my library are my memory, and it *works* as my memory for geographical reasons. I know roughly where the book is; I remember roughly where within the book the sought-after info is; I remember what the visual terrain on the page looked like, and where on the page relative to that terrain the info sat. When print shuffles itself so readily that the info loses its “geography”. We are left with searching the document at command line, and my suspicion is that’s not the right way to harness our memory mechanisms.